IntelliGantt turns Project Management in to Managable Projects. From the keyboard of a MOSS MVP, through the pipes of the internet and direct to your browser I love putting data on the move. And, as it turns out, writing about it.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Basecamp by itself does not support levels of effort and hourly rates for people. Basecamp with IntelliGantt, however, most certainly does. We let you provide level of effort and hourly rate values for every person in your Basecamp project. Then, when you assign someone to a task, IntelliGantt will compute the cost for that task by multiplying the work * level of effort * hourly rate for that person. Combined with the cost rollup feature, you can quickly see how much a particular task is costing and even how much an entire project is costing. Here's how it works.

After you have allowed IntelliGantt to communicate with Basecamp and have chosen an account, you can select one or more projects to work with. When you select a project it gives you a quick overview of how much work and cost is involved for all the items in the project.

When you select a person in the 'People' dialog, you can quickly see how much work is assigned to that person and what their default level of effort and hourly rate are.

When you create or edit a task assignment, by default the values come from that users default level of effort and hourly rate. However, you can override this on an assignment-by-assignment basis, should you choose, with specific level of effort and hourly rate for that task assignment.

Put all this together and you can quickly see what the cost for both individual tasks are their rollups are.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

The IntelliGantt App for SharePoint 2013 let's you extend the basic user profiles within SharePoint so that you can tracking costs with your Task List items. For each SharePoint person you can give them an hourly rate and a level of effort value that IntelliGantt reads. Then if you assign that person to a task, IntelliGantt will compute it's cost. That is, duration in hours * level of effort * hourly rate. Here's the simplest example to get up and running.

First we must make sure every user profile in SharePoint has an 'Effort' and 'Hourly Rate' field. To do that you'll need administrative rights to your site collection. With these rights go to the SharePoint Admin Center.

Click on the 'User Profiles' and 'Manage User Properties link.

We will want to add these two fields to the 'Custom Properties' of the User Profile field template. Here we've already added the two fields.

The key here is to make sure the field names and data types are exactly what IntelliGantt expects. 'Hourly Rate' should have a field name of 'HourlyRate' and a data type of 'float'. Similarly, 'Effort' should have a field name of 'Effort' and a data type of 'float'.

Now we simply plug in the actual hourly rate and effort values for each user. The administrator can do this our the users themselves by editing their profile information.

When the IntelliGantt App for SharePoint 2013 pulls in a Task List (or two or three) it will check to see if the person assigned to a task has hourly rate and effort information. If so, then you will see cost information calculated for you automatically.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

The IntelliGantt App for SharePoint 2013 can run both outside and inside of a SharePoint site. We saw how easy it is to place IntelliGantt for SharePoint 2013 on any web page using a single link. Now we will show how that same link can be used to embed IntelliGantt within a SharePoint 2013 page. This example will show us pulling data from the same site we are placing IntelliGantt, however, IntelliGantt's unique architecture will allow you to pull in data from any SharePoint 2013 source.

So here is a basic, out-of-the-box SharePoint 2013 site. In it I have created two task lists that we wish to view in our rich IntelliGantt UI: Tasks and Task List 1.

We will add a web part to this page, so let's go into edit mode.

Use the native tools to select the area you wish to add the web part. We will put it at the top in this example.

We will insert a Page Viewer web part, found under the media and content category.

OK, now we have a new Page Viewer web part on the page that is 100% empty because it's not pointing to anything. So we will edit the properties of the Page Viewer web part to point to IntelliGantt.

Though the URL is a bit long, it's always the same. Plug in https://www.intelligantt.com/SharePoint/application2.html for the URL value. Why application2.html? Because that is version 2 of our IntelliGantt App for SharePoint 2013. Major updates will increase the number at the end of 'application', but the previous versions will always be around so you can update on your schedule.

The other thing I like to do is specify how tall and wide to make the web part. Here we will plug in 500 pixels and 1200 pixels respectively. Also, let's update the title.

And here is our IntelliGantt App for SharePoint 2013! Though it is a bit empty.

This is because IntelliGantt doesn't know what to show yet. Remember earlier I mentioned that it can pull data from any SharePoint 2013 source? This is true, even for the current site! So we will add the current site to IntelliGantt's list of sources. Yes, this also means that IntelliGantt can pull in 1 or more task lists from 1 or more SharePoint sites-- within the same collection or from completely different sites and SharePoint servers altogether.

Please note that IntelliGantt will need your user login and password to communicate with SharePoint. IntelliGantt stores the SharePoint site information in your web browsers local storage. Should you choose to remember your username and password, IntelliGantt will store this in the web browsers local storage as well.

Now that IntelliGantt knows which SharePoint site to talk to, it will get all of its task lists and display them in a rich, interactive Gantt Chart visualization.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Our new IntelliGantt App for SharePoint lets you access SharePoint 365 Online task lists with any modern web browser on any web page with a simple link. This means you can work with your SharePoint task data from within your SharePoint.com site or on any web page available on the internet. From a classic desktop PC, laptop, Mac, MacBook, Surface, iPad, Android tablet-- anything you can think of-- we make it easy to work with SharePoint.

You can access this directly by clicking on it, or embed it within an iframe to place it on any page. Once you do, it will look like this:

IntelliGantt for SharePoint is fully interactive both in UI feedback and its data connection to SharePoint. When you make a change, it's made on SharePoint as well. Let's start with a simple login so we can see some data. First click on the 'Sites' cog so we can add a SharePoint.com site to the list (yes, you can view more than one site and its task lists at a time).

Enter your SharePoint site information. IntelliGantt for SharePoint 2013 is designed out of the box to work with Microsoft's Office 365 cloud offering. If you are using SharePoint 2013 on premises, that will be supported as well, but takes additional configuration.

If you choose to have IntelliGantt remember your username and password by clicking 'Remember', this information is ONLY stored on your local browser. Once you are properly authenticated, IntelliGantt for SharePoint will find all the task lists in the given site and display their contents.

You will also be able to 'pre-select' the lists to show, which view to apply and other settings, but that is for future posts.

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I create tools for SharePoint, Basecamp, Google+ and Facebook for my own products and for contracts. I've focused on SharePoint Project Management solutions for the last 7 years with worldwide deployments and specific contract solutions for multi-million dollar products and initiatives. I'm here to help with what the industry needs today and tomorrow. Contact me if you have a product you'd like to integrate with web-based platforms.